Eagle Tech Consus USB 2.0 / eSATA External Enclosure

The integrated USB 2.0 cable with the Eagle Consus is not very long at all, but it should be just long enough to get the job done. Installing a SATA hard drive (or solid-state drive) into the Consus CS2PESU2-BK is quite simple and just requires the removal of two screws. The drive simply slides in and then there are two screws to be secured on each end. It is a very simple and quick installation. There is a LED towards the top of the drive enclosure for indicating power and drive activity.

For testing out the Consus we had installed in it a 120GB Fujitsu MHY2120BH Serial ATA hard drive that runs at 5400 RPM and has an 8MB cache. The installation was smooth and immediately when connecting it to a system running Ubuntu 9.10 with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel the Consus drive enclosure was detected and there were no issues to report. The controller on this drive enclosure is made by JMicron Technology and has an idProduct of 0x2329, which is a common USB/ATA bridge.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite we ran a few benchmarks of the Eagle Tech Consus USB 2.0 / eSATA External Enclosure and found its performance to be okay. For instance, its hdparm disk read speed with this Toshiba SATA drive averaged out to 29MB/s, which was just shy of where the SilverStone Raven RVS01 was reading at with a speed of 32MB/s. The write speeds were also slightly less. However, it is not that much slower and still decent for an economical drive enclosure.

This is our first time testing out a product from Eagle Tech Computers, but we ended up being fairly pleased with the Consus (CS2PESU2-BK). This drive enclosure is quite small -- just slightly bigger than a standard 2.5-inch mobile HDD/SDD itself -- and it features an integrated USB 2.0 cable, which is quite handy. This drive enclosure is also made of aluminum rather than plastic and lastly it boasts an eSATA interface too, which is nice for taking advantage of this newer and faster standard. This Eagle 2.5-inch drive enclosure can be found for about $22 USD at either Amazon or NewEgg, which is quite a modest deal for this drive enclosure.